Selling our house and buying

[Jas8085]

Hi all,
We are planning to sell our 3 bed house to buy a bigger house. Should we have a buyer before offering on a property we like? What if we find a buyer and not find anything we like :( What come first?

Please can you share your experience of how chains work?

I will gratefully take any relevant advice that can help me stay sane through this. Thank you.

Most (all?) agents/ sellers won't accept an offer from you until your own property is under offer. Because, essentially, until you've found a buyer for yours you can't buy anything else.

So, put yours on market first. No harm, of course, in starting to look at properties while you're waiting for an offer on yours.

Yes, you put your house on the market first.

While it's on the market, you start your search. Once you have an offer, you are then in the position to offer also.

If you have seen a place you want to offer on, go for it.
If you haven't then up your search!

If you don't find somewhere you like, then you risk losing your buyer, but it's not the end of the world, you just start again and hope to find a new buyer .

My old neighbours had a buyer who waited patiently for 4 months for them to find somewhere they liked. In the end the decided to stay put. If I was the buyer I would have been . I suspect that is an extreme, and I'm not sure many buyers would wait 4 months.

Don't sell before you have found place to buy unless you have a really good reason to. My friend did this, prices went up and the place she eventually got was much smaller than she could have got if only she'd held onto her place until she was in a position to offer also. She lost out on a considerable profit on the original house also.

Put your house on the market first.

I found some estate agents wouldn't even entertain a viewing until our house was sold.

Keep your eye on the market in the meantime - by the time we came to offer I was comfortable with what similar houses sold for and what unique features the one we wanted had.

If you find a buyer but not a house you can go into a rental for a while. That puts you in a very strong position when you do find something.

Thanks for your suggestions ladies!

I'm currently prepping ( kids and the lazy husband have turned the house into a dump) the house to go on the market. Should be ready to in a couple of weeks.

I sold last year and moved to a cheap rental so that I'm ready to go when I see something I like, not an ideal fix for some, but always an option if you find a buyer before you find what you want

The rental thing is a huge risk. If prices go up at all you while you're renting you will lose out.

We put House on market in April, sold in May and had had an offer accepted on another house. That went tits up for various reasons that weren't our fault. Finally gave up and found new house we are completing on this Friday. Our chain has waited for us. Glad to be at the end of this!!

We didn't put ours on until we had an offer accepted on out purchase house, but I understand that to be unusual. The one we bought was a harder sell for the agent than ours so they accommodated us and then worked hard to sell ours quickly so as not to lose the sales. It depends a lot on what the market is like for the types of houses in the two price brackets in your area.